Colin Hanks was in New York City for the Tribeca Film Festival when he decided to visit the 9/11 Memorial Museum last April. “What really resonated with me—the thing that made me break down in tears in public—were the little details,” he tells Vanity Fair via FaceTime. “The looks that people shared with each other, the things that someone remembered hearing that then ended up being the thing that saved their life. That made me incredibly emotional.”

This was the motivation Hanks may have needed to make his second documentary: Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends), which premieres in select theaters on February 10 and airs on HBO February 13. The film, the first from Live Nation Productions, focuses on the terrorist attack on November 13, 2015 at the Bataclan theater in Paris—which took place as the Palm Desert–based rock band Eagles of Death Metal, featuring Hanks’s longtime friend Jesse Hughes, was performing.

Everyone in the band survived, but four members of their team did not. Merchandise manager Nick Alexander was killed, along with three of the label’s employees: Thomas Ayad, Marie Mosser, and Manu Perez.

Three months later, when Hughes, Josh Homme (who hadn’t been in Paris during the attack, but formed the band with Hughes in 1998), fill-in drummer Julian Dorio, and guitarist Dave Catching were set to return to Paris for a memorial show, Hanks’s producing partner suggested they film it. “I think more than anything else,” Hanks says, “we wanted to be able to show that these are human beings trying to make sense of their situation—a situation in which nothing makes any sense.”

Vanity Fair spoke with Hanks about making the film, healing, and his ultimate goal: making it so nobody involved in the attack will ever have to talk about it again.

Courtesy of HBO.

Vanity Fair: Was making this documentary harder emotionally than shooting your first one?

Colin Hanks: Absolutely. Doing docs is very different from what I call the “day job”—putting on makeup and pretending to be other people. Tower took seven years to make, whereas this took seven months to make. There wasn’t a lot of time to think about things too much, and more than anything else, this one was very personal, and for number of reasons.

I thought the hardest part was going to be interviewing my friends. But because that friendship existed, we all agreed that it had to be uncomfortable; that the only way this was going to work was if they understood that we needed to be honest, to be truthful, and that I would, to the best of my ability, make sure that the end result would be something that we all could be proud of.

With the survivors [we interviewed in the film], I didn’t have that luxury. That was the most difficult part—because these are people that I do not know, that I had not spoken to before I interviewed them. These were people that had been hounded by every news organization around the globe for three months, and they had not told their story publicly to anybody yet.

The film doesn’t show any footage of the bloodshed or aftermath of the attack. Was that a personal choice or a technical one?

I didn’t want to show any violence or blood. I often feel—and especially in the weeks after the attacks—that we become desensitized because [the news] shows the same clips over and over again. There’s something that feels wrong about that. I was trying to find a way to make sure that the people that we were speaking to, that their stories were conveyed in the most impactful and respectful way possible. Those little human moments give a much more honest depiction as to what it’s like to witness something like that.

Jesse says in the film that the band’s return show didn’t have anything to do with politics. Do you agree?

I do, yeah. It was about something much more important than something as wide ranging as “politics.” Sure, it was symbolic, but I feel that show was really more about the people, the survivors and what they needed in that moment. That Olympia show was one of the most important rock concerts that have ever happened. It wasn’t easy for a lot of people to go to that show; it wasn’t easy for the band to play that show. But it was something that had to be done. If they waited any longer, it would’ve become even more difficult. That show was to me the collective first step that everyone was taking to move on with their lives. The next chapter started that day. That’s what we wanted the film to capture and represent.

Yet watching the film, it’s impossible not to connect it to politics.

I can understand that. There’s always going to be some sort of geopolitical undertones in anything like that, but the way I see it, this is a very complex issue. There is nothing simple about being at the center of a terrorist attack.

ISIL committed this atrocity, and Donald Trump has passed an immigration ban targeting Muslim people. What are your thoughts surrounding the politics that lead to the attack?

Any comment that I have about the Muslim ban really has nothing to do with the movie, because it is a rather recent development. There’s a very specific reason why we didn’t discuss the political elements of the attack in the film, because ultimately it doesn’t matter. In terms of what’s going on now, if I was going to say anything, I just think it’s incredibly disappointing. I don’t think that it is a fair representation of what America represents around the world.

Josh talks about how the band represents something other than just music now. Is that a reason that you made the film? To show what they represent?

No. The reason I made the film was because I wanted to be able to create something so that anyone involved would never have to talk about it again in public. Jesse and Josh are my friends. They’d only done one interview before, with Vice, and they really didn’t want to be talking about this for the rest of their lives. It seemed like an opportunity to create something positive while also creating a document that shows all of the good of people coming together and trying to collectively move on. They do represent something now that is perhaps more important than just being torch bearers for rock ’n’ roll.

In our interview two years ago, you said that real stories are more interesting than fiction. Do you think that has any more weight nowadays?

I’ve always argued that that true stories are more fascinating. True stories are more fascinating when you hear them from the people that lived them—there’s an extreme power in that. As an actor, I’m always trying to find an emotional truth; that can seem silly, considering I pretend to be other people for a living, but that is what I’m trying to do with documentaries; you’re constantly trying to decipher what the truth is, which can be difficult because you’re dealing with different people's perspectives.

When we would talk about the challenges we would face making this doc, Joshua said, “There are three truths: your truth, my truth, and the truth. The challenge for you is going to be to get as close to the truth as you possibly can.” In this day and age—and when I say “this day and age,” I mean really the last year—the truth is a very important thing that needs to be protected at all costs. Maybe that’s one of reasons why documentaries are so popular right now, because people really need that.